Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [379]
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
It’s a pretty darn good buy, the bundle of product you receive for about forty dollars a month. You get in excess of a hundred channels, each with twenty-four-hour entertainment. If you buy a cup of coffee for four bucks and add a sandwich, you get to ten bucks, then drive across the George Washington Bridge, where the toll is eight bucks—these are everyday things that you don’t even think twice about. Like if you take the family to a game or go to the movies, you’re going to spend far in excess of what is asked for cable television. I believe cable is perhaps the greatest bargain in history.
We’re very careful about what we acquire and what we spend. We have never felt that we can own everything; we don’t have a desire to do that. We’re focused on adding world-class properties to our offerings, and in the last several years we’ve acquired the Masters, US Open tennis, the SEC, British Open golf, Big Ten, the Rose Bowl, the BCS, the ACC, and Barclays Premier League. We’re focused on putting out the best possible sports product we can, but that does not, and will not, mean that ESPN acquires product that doesn’t strengthen our position with sports fans.
DAVID HILL:
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that for the most part, I think ESPN rates something like a 0.7. So that means that 99.3 percent of Americans—somewhere around 299 million people—don’t give a rat’s ass about ESPN. Yet somehow, ESPN has convinced cable operators that the people will rise up with torches and pitchforks and storm the castle if they ever take it off the air. And that’s how ESPN has convinced cable owners to pay them a lot of money every month. And that’s how they’re able to be so unbelievably profitable. God bless them.
JOHN SAUNDERS:
Bob Ley and Chris Berman have been here for thirty years; I’ve been here around twenty-three years, so I was third in the pecking order. For the thirtieth-anniversary show, it would have been very easy for them to just use Bob and Chris, but Norby put me on the show, and when I went to thank him, he told me that Chris Berman had been the one who said, “You know, John should be on this show too.” For Chris to do that, and for Norby to agree to it, was great. I’ve never saved tapes—there are people in this business who save every tape or DVD of every show they’ve ever done—but I did with this one. It was probably the moment that made me feel proudest of my accomplishments here at ESPN.
Nothing in the ESPN rulebook specifically forbade office romances (indeed, there had been almost a dozen marriages between ESPN employees), and no one had ever been dismissed because of an affair with a colleague. That didn’t mean there weren’t confrontations. After one male producer had basically created a totally different life for himself on the road, with a woman in every city, someone on the staff decided to fly his wife out to surprise him for his birthday, knowing that his private life would be discovered. Another time, someone on the production crew made audiotapes of amorous conversations between a married producer and a reporter.
There have actually been at least eight marriages between coworkers in which both parties remained at the network. But relationships among equals are different than affairs between on-air talent and young production assistants. Baseball analyst Steve Phillips had one such relationship in 2009, and it erupted into a horrendous mess for the network and for all actual and potential lovers within its sphere. Cynics